China Wants To Track Its Citizens By Tapping Into Their Phones

Casey Chan

In yet another frightening instance of China manipulating technology for their purpose, China is looking to track 17 million Chinese citizens by tapping into their mobile phone’s location. The “research”, as China would like their people to think of it, is part of an initiative to improve Beijing’s public transportation system.

The general idea is that whenever someone switches on their phone in Beijing, China, a signal will be transmitted and the government will be able to find out where each person is going in real time. Yeah. The initiative, called “Platform for Citizen Movement Information”, hopes to learn enough about traffic patterns and the flow of people that they can eventually provide the public with personalised traffic reports.

I’ve been to China before and seeing the sheer amount of people and traffic woes they have, there needs to be a solution. But I’ve also heard of China’s dark side, tracking their citizen’s every move by cell phone though ostensibly well intentioned, is a scary, scary proposition. [The Next Web]